The Crowd

Even where people share no tie or history, the same states arise among them, and those in whom they arise do not know it.

What was observed

The clearest evidence comes from studies in which the source of a state can be controlled. Sigal Barsade (2002) placed a trained actor in small negotiating groups, arguing from the same script in one of four engineered moods. The other members' moods moved toward his, and the groups' cooperation moved with them. Roland Neumann and Fritz Strack found that a neutral text read in a slightly happy or sad voice shifted listeners' moods toward the tone. Peter Totterdell found that cricket players' moods tracked their teammates' independently of how the match was going.

Elaine Hatfield, John Cacioppo and Richard Rapson (1994) gave the phenomenon its name, emotional contagion. Its first element is secure: people continuously and unconsciously imitate the faces, voices and postures around them, as Tanya Chartrand and John Bargh and Ulf Dimberg showed. Whether the imitation itself produces the feeling is contested. The route of contagion is not settled. That states are shared is.

What it shows

Every study at this scale shares one feature with the four scales before it: the people involved did not know. Each experienced the state as their own and explained it by whatever lay nearest. The sharing of states is pervasive, and it is invisible to those who share them.

Five scales, five literatures, one finding: what happens in one person is bound up with what happens in others, much of it below awareness, and at several scales it is organized among people and maintained by people who do not know they are maintaining it.

Next: the Paper, which proposes that persons, families and cultures are nested instances of one mental field, and that what appears between people is co-expressed, not transmitted.